Top 500 Ernest Hemingway Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later.”

— Ernest Hemingway

452. “But in the night he woke and held her tight as though she were all of life and it was being taken from him. He held her feeling she was all of life there was and it was true.”

— Ernest Hemingway

453. “Oh, now, now, now, the only now, and above all now, and there is no other now but thou now and now is thy prophet.”

— Ernest Hemingway

454. “And bed, he thought. Bed is my friend. Just bed, he thought. Bed will be a great thing. It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, the thought.”

— Ernest Hemingway

455. “I used to play cello. My mother kept me out of school a whole year to study music and counterpoint. She thought I had ability, but I was absolutely without talent.”

— Ernest Hemingway

456. “Wearing down seven number two pencils is a good day’s work.”

— Ernest Hemingway

457. “Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can.”

— Ernest Hemingway

458. “That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch.”

— Ernest Hemingway

459. “You ought to dream. All our biggest businessmen have been dreamers.”

— Ernest Hemingway

460. “Mr. Barnes, it is because I have lived very much that now I can enjoy everything so well.”

— Ernest Hemingway

461. “Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.”

— Ernest Hemingway

462. “I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.”

— Ernest Hemingway

463. “The most beautiful fighting machine I have ever seen.”

— Ernest Hemingway

464. “Experiencing differences is crucial to the human condition. Especially when that difference is over the head, blower powder.”

— Ernest Hemingway

465. “Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.”

— Ernest Hemingway

466. “A writer without a sense of justice or injustice would be better off editing the yearbook for a school for exceptional children.”

— Ernest Hemingway

467. “The old man looked at him with his sun-burned, confident loving eyes.”

— Ernest Hemingway

468. “Oh, darling, I’ve been so miserable.”

— Ernest Hemingway

469. “If you’re looking for messages, try Western Union.”

— Ernest Hemingway

470. “We need more true mystery in our lives Hem- he said. The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most. There is of course the problem of sustenance.”

— Ernest Hemingway

471. “A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.”

— Ernest Hemingway

472. “Shooting gives me a good feeling. It is faster than baseball and you are out on one strike.”

— Ernest Hemingway

473. “Out of all the things you could not have there were some things that you could have and one of those was to know when you were happy and to enjoy all of it while it was there and it was good.”

— Ernest Hemingway

474. “Wars are Spinach. Life in general is the tough part. In war all you have to do is not worry and know how to read a map and co-ordinates.”

— Ernest Hemingway

475. “I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends.”

— Ernest Hemingway

476. “But perhaps he had enough animal strength and detached intelligence that he could make another start.”

— Ernest Hemingway

477. “You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.”

— Ernest Hemingway

478. “The fact that I am interrupting serious work to answer these questions proves that I am so stupid that I should be penalized severely. I will be. Don’t worry.”

— Ernest Hemingway

479. “It is one thing to be in the proximity of death, to know more or less what she is, and it is quite another thing to seek her.”

— Ernest Hemingway

480. “Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.”

— Ernest Hemingway

481. “They arrested us after breakfast.”

— Ernest Hemingway

482. “Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.”

— Ernest Hemingway

483. “My training was never to drink after dinner nor before I wrote nor while I was writing.”

— Ernest Hemingway

484. “It’s a town you come to for a short time.”

— Ernest Hemingway

485. “I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.”

— Ernest Hemingway

486. “Thou wilt go now, rabbit. But I go with thee. As long as there is one of us there is both of us.”

— Ernest Hemingway

487. “There is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dissect out. It continues and is always valid.”

— Ernest Hemingway

488. “Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.”

— Ernest Hemingway

489. “For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.”

— Ernest Hemingway

490. “It was strange how easy being tired enough made it.”

— Ernest Hemingway

491. “It is impossible to believe the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure, classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet serge draped over a stick.”

— Ernest Hemingway

492. “As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ’forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”

— Ernest Hemingway

493. “The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything.”

— Ernest Hemingway

494. “People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.”

— Ernest Hemingway

495. “Something, or something awful or something wonderful was certain to happen on every day in this part of Africa.”

— Ernest Hemingway

496. “Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.”

— Ernest Hemingway

497. “A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.”

— Ernest Hemingway

498. “Practice any faith you wish. Got a ball field up the island where you can practice. I’ll give the Deity a fast one high and inside if he crowds the plate.”

— Ernest Hemingway

499. “Defense is the stronger form with the negative object, and attack the weaker form with the positive object.”

— Ernest Hemingway

500. “He was violating the second rule of the two rules for getting on well with people that speak Spanish; give the men tobacco and leave the women alone.”

— Ernest Hemingway